1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image capturing system, an image capturing method, and a program. In particular, the present invention relates to an image capturing system and an image capturing method for capturing an image, and to a program used by the image capturing system.
2. Related Art
A known electronic endoscope includes a plurality of light receiving elements arranged in a matrix on a single semiconductor substrate, and is provided with a solid image capturing element on a tip thereof that can obtain visible light image information and fluorescent light image information, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2004-329583. An endoscope apparatus is known that creates a fluorescent observation image using (i) an image signal of a subject captured by an image capturing means when a light source irradiates the subject with illumination light and (ii) an image signal of a subject captured by an image capturing means when a light source irradiates the subject with excitation light, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2006-43289.
In the electronic endoscope described above, the illumination light and the excitation light are emitted sequentially with prescribed time cycles, so that the illumination light image cannot be captured while the excitation light is being emitted. In the endoscope apparatus described above captures images as red, green, and blue light is emitted sequentially, and therefore cannot obtain a visible light image with a single image capture. For these reasons, the devices disclosed in the above patent documents cannot capture images at a high frame rate, such as those viewed by a doctor, and often skip frames in a resulting video. Therefore, this video appears choppy to the viewer.